You Can Tell a lot About a Company from What They Write on the Web

645 PRO is the first and only iPhone camera app to give you RAW image data, a workflow essential for many professionals. Its JPEGs, too, are of a quality typically associated with high-end digital cameras, with the option to save truly “lossless” JPEGs.

And that’s the kind of RAW data that 645 PRO supplies. Its nothing like as “uncooked” as the image data in a top-end RAW file. But it has never been through a JPEG compression stage, and goes through no in-app processing at all. It consists of the straight pixel data and that’s all. It’s then wrapped up as a TIFF image (with non-lossy compression) and saved. We did look at the option of using DNG files (Adobe’s open standard for RAW image files) but realised there was no practical benefit to doing so and a serious downside of bigger files that saved more slowly – not to mention far less application support.

No, it’s not a RAW file – to be honest, it’s unlikely that the small, relatively simple, image-sensing modules found in iPhones will ever be able to provide us that (although we’ll keep trying to push the limits of what an iPhone’s camera can do, so who knows?).

So which is it?

Making an app is hard, marketing them is even harder. It’s easy to claim something bold in order to get people’s attention, but saying something which is not true is just wrong.

The reason why Apple ships the iPhone without the complexity of a full-blown camera is because there’s no need for it. Anyone who needs a full-quality image will settle on a camera. The camera on the iPhone is designed to capture the best possible image at the easiest, fastest and most efficient way with their mobile image sensor, anything that defies that objective is just redundant.

On a side note, an app that requires a user manual — especially a 32-page PDF one — is never suppose to make it to the app store.